ON THE FLOOR (2)
ON THE FLOOR in Nona’s room, moments after Maurice was kicked out: how the mother threw herself down, first falling to her knees, appealing to someone or something, and then facedown on the floor, banging her forehead on the floor. “Seeing her is like seeing a building fall,” said Nona, “a building.”
FOREHEAD
SHE HAD A small forehead, a narrow strip between the line of her eyebrows and her hairline. A small nose. A small mouth. Small gaps between the small features of her face. The mother’s smallness was praised both in Nona’s quarter-shack and in the mother’s shack as welclass="underline" small was good. In Egypt, when a woman was small she was more of a woman. “Big” in a woman was shocking, in other words, like a man. Everything was determined by the feet, and by the limbs in generaclass="underline" big feet (“boats”) and big hands dragged in their wake the curse of the big, the unwomanly. The child was scolded for having a big mouth, especially when she laughed. “Don’t laugh,” the Nona warned her. “You’ve got a mouth on you like Isma’il Yasin, God save us.” Isma’il Yasin was an Egyptian comedian with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear, even when he wasn’t laughing. “Tell me again who my mouth is like,” the child asked Nona again and again, and she told her, and made both of them laugh.
SHE SAID
SHE SAID WHAT was forbidden to say (she said it twice), forbidden to repeat (the child repeated it), forbidden to give any kind of force to, true or false (the Nona said: “It’s a lie, a lie”), because of the fabric of life — which even if it was stuck together with spit and joined what couldn’t be joined, even with spit, was still the fabric of life, stretching between those who were in the shack and those who weren’t, filling the air between door and door, the mother’s door and the Nona’s door, imprinted on a person’s face, the face by which each person knew himself.
From the moment she said it, hurled the words into the room, they tasted flat, or the opposite, so strong that nothing could follow them, only an emptiness that wasn’t even silence, the silence of the Nona, but simply speechlessness — it was something unspeakable that you die with, not live with, that you take to the grave, because what she said, what she had to say, was a kind of grave.
The child invented the circumstances of this utterance, the place, and the time: she planted the circumstances, the place, and the time, exactly when Maurice left Nona’s quarter-shack, after the mother kicked him out, and then fell on the floor.
She wanted the event to boil in her memory, she wanted the mother’s words to boil in her heart, immediately and urgently, for the boiling to purify the awfulness of the words, to amount to extenuating circumstances. But then, when the mother threw herself down (Nona said: “she threw herself down”), perhaps she said something else out of the boiling of her heart, not “that,” not the thing that had been gestating inside her for years, true or false, half-true or half-false, and emerged all at once, fully formed, perhaps in different circumstances, at another time and place (how many other places could there have been?): “I know everything, everything,” said the mother. “Maurice told me everything,” she said. “The Nona kept persuading him to go to bed with her,” she said. “The woman who calls herself my mother wanted him to go to bed with her all those nights he came to her,” she said. “Behind my back all that filth of his and hers,” she said, “all that filth.”
BETWEEN DOOR AND DOOR
BUNDLED IN THREE sheets tied at the corners, Corinne’s clothes and her baby’s things wandered between door and door: the door of the mother’s shack and the door of Corinne’s and Mermel’s one-room apartment in the housing project for young couples on the way to Amishav. He would drop her off early in the morning, driving his silver Lark: first the bundles would land on the washed porch, and then Corinne with the baby, following Mermel with a closed face. “Yallah to your mother, salamat,” said Mermel, because he had started to talk like them, the way they talked in the shack. The usual day began.
Usually the mother was watering the rosebushes, and she hurried to turn the tap off when she saw the silver Lark coming (he painted it silver in honor of Corinne, who thought and also said that this color, with its class, toned down the hishik-hishik of the Lark, which was altogether a gangster’s car).
Mermel went on standing on the porch, very tall, with his shifty look and the car keys dangling from his finger, moving nervously from side to side as he spoke by means of and through the mother to Corinne, who by now had usually entered the shack. Through the noise of the electric saws in Moshe’s carpentry shop across the road, and the beating of the iron in Sammy’s welding shop, the whole neighborhood heard every word that was said: his voice was really something.
“Believe me, I don’t understand your daughter,” he usually said in the moments of ostensible appeasement and reconciliation that came and went in the stream of his volubility like tacking stitches in cloth: “Kill me if I understand what she wants.”
“What does she want, what does she want?” Corinne’s voice mocked him from inside the house: “What she wants is to cut off your head and stop your tongue from lying.” The mother wanted them to explain to her, she made Mermel sit down on one of the wrought-iron chairs on the porch and explain to her, gaining time: “But explain what happened,” she said, giving his finger a little slap, “and stop making a noise with those keys — it leads to quarrels.”
“There’s already a quarrel”—Corinne’s voice rose from inside again—“don’t listen to him, you hear? He’s a gambler,” and then, throughout the hour or more that Mermel unburdened himself into the open kitchen window, bursts of “he’s a gambler” broke out from inside the house like rounds of fire from a machine gun — in the middle of his sentences, at the end, and in the very short pauses between them, without any connection to what he said or what he didn’t say: “He’s a gambler, he’s a gambler.”
At ten o’clock in the morning silence usually fell, the day-to-day silence of the shack, which was a low chorus of sounds and noises: the sprinkler, the washing machine, the radio, the dripping of a tap, the crackle of the noodles slightly seared in the pan before they were added to the Syrian rice for the meatballs with garlic and cumin that Corinne liked.
The bundles in the striped sheets (“American, the good sort,” said the mother, who bought them for Corinne before she got married) stayed in the corner of the porch, static as Corinne: she, standing, sitting, walking around the shack or the yard — was actually lying down most of the time, her limbs outspread and eyes staring at the ceiling. Once every two days she was seized by a strange impulse of activity and fell on her clothes: dyed a blouse, cut up a skirt, or pulled the buttons off a jacket to replace them with others. And then she stared into space some more, as if she were still standing on the threshold of her life story, and not in the middle of it, her olive cheeks with their high cheekbones stretching up to the hollow temples, frightening in their fragility. “She isn’t with us now, she’s in her dreams,” murmured the mother, cooing at the baby who tried in vain to attract Corinne’s attention, climbing onto her lap and cupping her cheeks in his little hands, or banging loudly with a ladle on the saucepans he took out of the kitchen cupboard and then crawling into it, curling up on the empty bottom shelf. At night he screamed almost without a pause; the mother picked him up, walked around the dark neighborhood with him in her arms, patting him on his squirming buttocks, leading his insistent, ceaseless wailing up and down the streets. Around Corinne she walked on tiptoe, everyone tiptoed around her: the metallic brittleness she gave off and the unexpected bursts of rage filled the air around her with fear and pity. Corinne said that she wasn’t waiting for Mermel, and as far as she was concerned he might as well be dead. “Don’t say that,” the mother protested, “he’s the father of your child.” “He isn’t anybody’s father, he’s zero,” retorted Corinne, got dressed up, put on high heels, and took the bus to the gambling joint next to the market to look for Mermel and ask him for money. It was morning, Mermel wasn’t there, but his friends were. She overturned a table, she took a stack of bills and crammed them into her purse, after she tore their cards up one by one and threw the baize cloth out of the window, into the busy street of the market. On her way home she passed the pet shop next to the bus stop, and stood for a long time riveted to a pair of honey-colored Pekinese puppies, male and female, with certificates and pedigrees. She bought them both, with all the money she had taken from the club. On the bus home she held the puppies on her lap, under her buttoned coat. Their names were Pat and Patishon: Patishon was the plump and rather stupid male, Pat the bad-tempered female, who bared her sharp teeth and growled whenever anyone came near her, but didn’t do anything.